Part VI - Trailblazers

Summary

In this final grouping, we consider the two countries (of those we have studied; Hungary and Slovenia would belong here too) that have by most criteria traveled furthest along the path toward democratic consolidation, Poland and Czechia. As of 1999, Poland was performing better than Czechia on many counts, especially economic criteria. Poland continued to enjoy reasonably strong growth, whereas the Czech economy had been in the doldrums since 1997. Yet when it comes to politics, it could be argued that the relationship between the president and parliament has often been on a healthier footing in Prague than in Warsaw. Moreover, Czechia did not experience the “two steps forward, one step back” scenario – i.e., the coming to power, through the ballot box, of the communist successor party.

Our results largely confirm the relative democratic success of these two countries, though they also show that the discursive underpinnings or accompaniments of this success are not to be found in Western-style liberal democracy. Poland and Czechia both appear to lack nostalgic and highly nationalistic discourses of the sort we have identified in some other post-communist countries. All this augurs well for the two countries. But inasmuch as other Central and Eastern European countries (outside the former Soviet Union) shared many of their pre-1989 experiences, there is no reason why these other countries could not one day feature a similar sort of pattern.